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Desert Stories: Claire Vaye Watkins Talks About ‘Battleborn’

By John Williams September 5, 2012 11:11 amSeptember 5, 2012 11:11 am

Claire Vaye Watkins’s first book, “Battleborn,” a collection of short stories, arrives with notable provenance (the stories originally appeared in The Paris Review and elsewhere) and an unusually compelling author biography. Ms. Watkins’s father, Paul Watkins, was once a member of Charles Manson’s “family.” In Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” he’s described as “a good-looking youth with a way with women” who “had been Manson’s chief procurer of young girls.” In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Watkins discussed learning about her father’s life, the hold Nevada has on her imagination, her “obsessive and controlling” sense of play when she was a child and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q.

You were six years old when your father died, and you were 10 when you learned that he had been a close associate of Charles Manson’s who eventually testified against him. Do you remember how you felt when you first learned those details?

A.

I felt relieved, mainly because my younger sister would have a rebuttal to the kid who had been teasing her at school, saying our father was a murderer. When we asked our mother about this taunt, she pointed us to our bookshelf, to “Helter Skelter.” We looked up our father in the index and skimmed the pages that mentioned him to see whether he had killed anyone. When we were satisfied he hadn’t, when we could categorize him squarely as a “good guy” rather than a “bad guy,” we went back to watching “Ghostwriter” or whatever. It was not a moment of epiphany in which my eyes burned with anguish and anger, not an “Araby” moment.

Q.

Did your father’s life spur your interest in storytelling at all?

A.

Maybe. I did learn a lot about him from books. But I’m more inclined to trace my storytelling impulses to rumors whispered in the isolation of the Mojave Desert, to our family’s roots in Alcoholics Anonymous, to being poor, to the museum and rock shop my mother ran, or to my mother herself, who was a terrific storyteller.

Q.

The first story in the collection, “Ghosts, Cowboys,” appears to be a mix of history, memoir and fiction. Did you have any hesitation about leading off a book of more traditional fiction with that one?

A.

“Ghosts, Cowboys” seemed a natural lead to the collection because it functions as a legend or key for reading the rest of the book. As to the blending of genres, while that’s an apt way to describe it, I never thought of “Ghosts, Cowboys” as anything but a story. It invites the question we ask after reading a lot of stories, even more traditional ones: Did this really happen?

Q.

How much research do you do for your stories? I’m thinking mostly of “The Diggings,” in which two brothers leave Cincinnati to look for gold in California in 1849.

A.

Every story I write is heavily researched, though that scaffolding is surely most visible in “The Diggings.” I watched documentary films about the Gold Rush, read several books about the forty-niners, and I read their letters. Research is important because it helps a writer get her facts right, of course, but that’s nothing a good copy editor can’t do. What’s essential about research for me is the way it tunes my ear to characters’ language.

Q.

Your stories are all set in Nevada, and early reviews have stressed their strong sense of place. There’s a hardscrabble desert feel to many of the pieces. How rural was your upbringing?

A.

The first house I lived in was in Tecopa, Calif., a place of about 100 people in the Mojave Desert, just south of Death Valley. Tecopa had a general store, a post office and a school, which had been shut down, and that’s about it. My mother drove two hours into Vegas for groceries, hardware, school supplies, clothes, pretty much anything we needed. We had a lot of land, a spring, there were coyotes, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and scorpions, a pet tortoise. My sister and I scrambled across the desert like little Bedouins. We were often naked.

After my father died my mother married a construction worker from Las Vegas, so we moved across the state line to Pahrump, Nev., a larger town with more amenities, so he would have an easier commute to job sites. I spent the majority of my childhood there. Both Tecopa and Pahrump are pretty remote, geographically and culturally. They’re places you go if you want to be left alone.

Lily GlassClaire Vaye Watkins

Q.

Are there other writers whose depictions of the West have served as particular inspiration or influence?

A.

When I was working on “Battleborn,” I clung to the way place was working in Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine,” Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” Tony Earley’s stories “Charlotte” and “The Prophet From Jupiter,” and later, Joy Williams’s “The Quick and the Dead.” Teachers and chums would often suggest I read the giant writers of the West — Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner — but I never did. I wasn’t avoiding them, I just had so much that I wanted to read that I didn’t quite make my way to them until after the book was done. I’ve still read shamefully little of those giants, though “Rock Springs” and “The Road” have hung with me.

Q.

Do you remember the first time you wrote a story?

A.

My first stories were recorded, rather than written. I think I was seven or maybe eight. My sister and I played a long, extended game of “house” with our babysitter’s kids. The premise was a pretty standard one: my sister, who is very small, was the baby and the rest of us were teenage orphan sisters who had to raise her. I taped each session on a recorder, and then I spent the evenings at home listening to the game, editing the day’s story onto another tape, cutting out the boring stuff. First thing the next day, I made all the girls listen to the new tape, telling them what was and wasn’t working from our last session, telling them to play up the Disneyland storyline, that the preacher father character had been cut, so-and-so was now a boyfriend with a motorcycle, etc. I was insane about this process and can still remember the fervor of recutting the stories and making notes for the next day’s arc. I was obsessive and controlling, an utter megalomaniac. Not exactly a fun playmate.

Q.

You’re now a teacher of creative writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. How long have you been in the Northeast? And has the region started to appeal to you as a place to write about?

A.

I’ve been in the Northeast for a little over a year. I like central Pennsylvania a great deal more than central Ohio, where I lived while doing my M.F.A. at Ohio State. Central Ohio is the kind of landscape that can make you resent the glaciers that scraped it flat. I appreciate where I am now because it’s also a bit remote, and while I’ve left Nevada, I still like to be left alone. To your other question, no, the place has not yet offered me its stories, though I can tell it’s rich with them.

Q.

Is there any piece of advice about writing that you regularly give to your students?

A.

I advise them to cultivate their inner vulnerability, and to read like fiends.

A version of this article appears in print on 09/10/2012, on page C4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Word With: Claire Vaye Watkins: Inspired by the Pull of the Desert.